Interviews with Monster Girls

I randomly remembered this manga so the least I can do is leave a review despite being late? This series was one of the first ones I read about interactions between humans and non-humans in the context of education. The series itself is relatively straight forward, a decent guy is a teacher for demi-humans? Knowing the differences between themselves, he still treats them with diligence enforced with kindness. Sure it's not the most exciting, yet somehow it works very well? It must also be mentioned the biggest bonus here is knowing there is a lessened focus on ecchi factors. Sure there may be some preview, thenthe development goes back to what's really going on

This manga is set in a world where demi-humans, also known as demis, have become a normal part of society. The main characters are a teacher named Takahashi, who has an especially strong interest in demis; his coworker Satou, a succubus; and three of their demi students: the vampire Hikari, the dullahan Machi, and the snow-woman Yuki. While this manga does clearly involve the supernatural, it is overall very grounded. The supernatural aspects are primarily used as a means to discuss living in society while having unique characteristics from a new angle. The earlier portions of the manga are pretty shallow in that regard, basically justusing cliche scenarios to repeat the same old messages, such as “discrimination is bad” and “you should be respectful of people’s differences,” in a pretty preachy way. However, as the manga progresses, it gains a considerable amount of depth. It has stories that look at things from more perspectives, such as those that focus more heavily on the perspectives of the demis’s parents. It also gives topics significantly more nuance and certain cases present differing viewpoints on how an issue could be looked at, for example whether demi experimentation should be allowed. It touches on quite a few interesting points and was overall pretty insightful. Alongside all that, there’s an overarching plot thread about how these supernatural elements actually fit into the realm of science. I wasn’t very fond of these portions of the manga. The way it’s written, it felt like the mangaka was trying to take real-world scientific concepts and then make leaps of logic from them to explain the supernatural. However, the mangaka either misunderstood or misrepresented much of the underlying science. For example, a complete misunderstanding of what an observer in quantum physics is. So none of this actually makes much sense. I obviously don’t have a problem with fiction just making stuff up, but from that perspective, these parts are just dull and overtly drawn out. Regardless, there’s not much value here. As for the rest of the story, I found it a bit too light on the drama. Forced drama can be grating, but at the same time, a complete lack of drama can make things boring. While this is a comedy manga, it’s not like it’s a gag manga. There isn’t enough comedy to hold up the manga, and it simply wouldn’t be possible for the comedy to be dense enough to do so considering that it also tackles some pretty important themes. So things getting more dramatic could help, but it never really goes there. Throughout the manga, everything goes super smoothly without any major issues or complications. The plot, the characters, everything is just too normal and plain to leave much of an impression. A lot of people really like a character named Saki, and I get it as conceptually she works really well, but I don’t feel the mangaka did enough with her for her to be all that great of a character in practice. The ending is satisfying enough I suppose, but ultimately, I found neither it nor the manga holistically all that memorable. I also didn’t like the art much. The backgrounds are pretty mediocre quality wise. But the bigger issue for me was that I wasn’t fond of the rough art style used for characters, nor of the character designs in general. tl;dr: A manga that deals with its core themes (being different and prejudice) pretty well, but is pretty uninteresting in terms of its plot and characters.